Movie genres run out of steam. It has ever been thus. So many Westerns were made in the first half-century of the American cinema that they still outnumber any other genre, but they’re a footnote now. Gangster movies were all the rage in the 1930s, films noir in the late 1940s, musicals from the Depression to the swinging ’60s, and teen comedies in the 1980s and ’90s. They seem to settle in forever… and then they fade. So too with the dominant genre of the 21st century, the superhero picture.
The new Supergirl, which opens this weekend, is not only a dud creatively, it’s going to lay a giant egg at the box office. Supergirl won’t be the final nail in the superhero coffin—there’s a Spider-Man movie coming out later this summer that will be a blockbuster, and an Avengers movie at Christmastime. But the complete lack of excitement surrounding its release and the fact that it plays like a joyless retread of Guardians of the Galaxy means the downward slope of the superhero picture has now gone entirely vertical. It’s Wile E. Coyote, and it’s run off the cliff, and it’s taken seven years or so for Mr. Coyote and everyone else to grasp that there is no ground beneath his feet. And so comes the plummet into the bottomless canyon.
This collapse is the logical end result of an unprecedented success. The superhero movie had made occasional waves in Hollywood in the 1970s and ’80s—Christopher Reeve’s Superman and Michael Keaton’s Batman in particular. But it was not until the release of Spider-Man in 2002 that Hollywood saw its future in turning comic books into epic motion pictures. Marvel’s guiding cinematic genius Kevin Feige conceived of a series of interlocking superhero movies that began with Iron Man in 2008 and then came to a roaring conclusion 11 years later with Avengers: Endgame. There were 18 movies in all, and Endgame ended its run as the box-office champion of all time. The total gross of the Marvel Cinematic Universe through Endgame was $22.5 billion at the box office; it has likely made another $10-15 million in ancillary earnings. Nothing like it has ever happened in the annals of popular culture.
People loved these movies so much they even flocked to the inferior versions based on the comics from rival DC Comics. Aquaman, a character so bizarre in conception that the TV show Entourage chose it as the target of its satirical portrait of the rise of a Hollywood star, finally did make it to the actual silver screen in a non-satirical version—and even that, one of the worst movies ever made, made a billion dollars. It was terrible, though its star, Jason Momoa, was pretty good. He’s also the best thing in Supergirl, playing a guy who rides into the movie on a hot steel hog and hits people with a big chain. Momoa’s character plays no role in the plot, which is all to the good, as the plot of Supergirl is so wretched it’s hard to believe anyone thought it was a good idea.
At the end of the reboot of Superman released last year, we were introduced to his cousin Kara, a.k.a. Supergirl. While Clark Kent is the same square and noble fellow he has always been, Kara turns out to be a wild child, a teenage party animal on a perpetual bender. That amusing conception of the character made me optimistic that Supergirl might be a gas. Nope.
Kara’s wild-child antics, it turns out, are part of her effort to cope with the haunting trauma of having lived through the destruction of Krypton. Since she doesn’t feel at home on Earth, she boozes it up all over the galaxy instead. But she is having absolutely no fun doing it, and we have absolutely no fun watching it, and Milly Alcock, the young Australian actress playing her, is having no fun playing it. That’s even more the case when she ends up in the middle of a fifth-rate version of Mad Max: Fury Road, featuring a gang of marauders that kidnaps a bunch of young women led by a guy with a lot of metal buttons in his face and a Russian accent, for some unknown reason. If you want to see some motorcycles and trucks driving around on the surface of a spaceship that is floating over a big lake, this movie is for you. I can’t think of who else it could possibly be for.
Marvel’s movies since Endgame have ranged from the mostly amusing (Shang-Chi and the Legend of Something or Other) to the unspeakably awful (Eternals) to the profoundly disappointing (The Fantastic Four). This actually provided DC with an opening both creatively and financially, and it sought to capitalize on that opening by hiring the inspired writer-director of Guardians of the Galaxy, James Gunn, to take charge of its cinematic slate. Gunn did pretty well with that Superman and has a sequel to it called Man of Tomorrow coming next year, but after this debacle, Gunn should temper any positive expectations. The lousiness of Supergirl (which he oversaw but neither wrote nor directed) means that whatever goodwill Gunn built up through the clever casting of David Corenswet as Superman and Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane will have long since dissipated by the time his second go-round hits theaters.
The thing is, the genre has no capacity for freshness any longer. The brilliance of Feige’s construction of the Marvel Cinematic Universe meant that it built and built and built to a genuinely grand climax unlike anything ever done before in the movies. The Avengers and every other Marvel hero got together and literally saved the universe from a Malthusian monster who had killed off 50 percent of all living beings—until they came along to reverse it. It makes sense, therefore, that there was nowhere else for the superhero movie to go but down, down, down. How could it ever compete with itself?
Anyway, the superhero movie dominated the industry for a quarter century. That’s a long stretch, but now it’s over. What comes next?
Maybe… nothing?
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